Digital images, especially when considered en masse, can utilize large amounts of data storage. In order to reduce the amount of storage needed, image compression may be used. Under certain conditions, it may be desirable to avoid losing any detail stored within an image when compresses. Under such circumstances, a lossless image compression algorithm may be used.
Various lossless image compression algorithms are known. One particular lossless image compression algorithm is the JPEG-LS algorithm. JPEG-LS uses prediction modeling in order to compactly encode prediction errors. The prediction modeling used by JPEG-LS is a form of spatial prediction which uses median edge detection. Another known image compression algorithm uses an inter-component prediction technique instead of spatial prediction. This known inter-component prediction technique takes advantage of decorrelation of similarities between color channels in an image.